Aztec Ruins

Aztec Ruins National Monument - 22 August

Rock ghosts and jailbreaks: back in Pioche

After the rock ghosts of the morning, the Ghost Town Art and Coffee Company was a lovely place to spend an hour or two. Housed in a late 19th century workshop with lovely exposed rough wood, it's now a gallery for Kelly Garni's beautiful found-object desert art. And it's a coffeehouse with a simple menu - hot meals cooked on the barbecue out back, and a range of coffees and frappe drinks. There was a lot to love here - we had a coffee in the morning then came back for lunch!

Ghost Town Art & Coffee has treasure within

First, the room itself has clear eastern light, and the walls are full of interesting objects. The artist's workshop takes up a big part of one walland his work is displayed throughout. It's a simple, open plan - I imagine it's very snug, too, on a cold winter day with the woodstove roaring hot. There are a few tables, and some reading material which we pounced on - two books on the town's mad wild west history, by local author Leo Schafer. They're both out of print and hard to find and we haven't finished reading them yet, so I guess we might be back there yet again some time. Also, the food itself was very tasty! I think my idea of a latte is not quite the same as the local one, but I really enjoyed the burger at lunch and the iced tea.

Then, the art itself appeals very much to me, with its re-use of found objects from ghost towns. I guess there's some question as to at what point such objects become of archaeological interest - it must be a sliding scale - but I certainly have a deep sympathy with anyone who picks up bits of rusty crap off the ground. He makes them into flat wall pieces, and uses cut pieces of old sheet metal as backs for vintage photos. The effect is striking, the colours vivid yet organic. The artist was kind enough to talk with us for quite a while about his finds and his work - I was glad to have been there at a quiet enough time for that. This is only one aspect of what he does, as he has an interesting history as a rock musician as well. I loved this profile article, a copy of which is on the wall.

But we weren't just there to loll about in coffee shops reading local history. No, indeed. We had museums to visit. (Also stopped by the old Opera House - as you do. A future post though, opera houses.)

Desert lake beach, dam museum

The Boulder City Museum packs a lot of fascination into a few rooms, starting with the Crash of 1929 and constructing the setting from which the Boulder Dam (or Hoover Dam) emerged. It is especially evocative of the dam workers' perspectives, full of small details of daily life at work and at home. The political history seems peripheral to this, but it gives you all the context you need to get a sense of who built it and how, and who fed and clothed them. (My favourite fact learned in this visit: an old name for the Colorado River was the Red Bull, because of its huge power and waters ruddy with sandstone sediment when in flood.)

There's also a twenty minute 1960s government video that I would not by any means have missed and might require a bribe of some kind to watch again. It's a modernist paeon to Man (especially Man the Engineer) and how he pours forth his manly concretions to cement his control over Nature (that wild red-blooded river) and it's as one-eyed as the one-eyed snake it fervidly evokes. (If I hear once more about the the river being penetrated and subjugated by the mighty erection of the dam I shall enter a nunnery. Possibly.) You'd have to know in advance, because you wouldn't find out during, that Indian, Black, and Asian Americans were prohibited from working on the project. Also that the damming of the Colorado at Black Canyon (the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead) irretrievably destroyed a whole downstream river ecology and native agriculture in order to redirect the water to subsidise rich California growers, It also drowned and destroyed important archaeological sites. No wonder the Bureau of Reclamation is at such pains to point out that the dam doesn't cost the taxpayer anything!

But the information about the dam construction, including original film, was fascinating and much of it was new to me. Even now it's a towering achievement of engineering. For the time, it must have been astounding.

I bought a small book about the CCC at Lake Mead by local author Dennis McBride before we left.

After a brief tour of the local art gallery in the same building, some lunch was in order. We drove down the hill to picnic at Boulder Beach, under a shade ramada provided by a benevolent government. There were several other families doing the same - some folks even had a cooking fire going in the 115 degree heat. We just had cold food and iced coffee quickly put together before leaving that morning.

We continued down to the lake shore itself. It's rocky, rather than sandy, and rough going, but we found a place to put down a blanket and get into our togs. Walking into the water was like stepping into a warm bath shared with two hundred other people. The silt makes the water completely opaque for the first forty feet or so, and each slow footstep, feeling for rocks, raises more. (Some guy near me went charging joyously in, inadvertently found a rock, and went headlong into the drink. He said he was okay. I saw him later with a cloth tied around his leg.) The water is clear and blue further out, near where the jetskis and fizz boats are buzzing back and forth, beyond a buoyed tape barrier. I kept walking, a slow zombie lurch from the uneven footing. Then, almost impalpably, the first slow tendrils of cooler water touched my ankles. I kept walking further and there was actual cold lake water. Really, almost cold ... although I can't recall the last time it was so painless dropping down into cool water on a hot day, because there was still a warm layer at the surface down to about waist depth.

I'm happy to say that even by the time we climbed out, wrestled with clothes onto damp skin, and walked up the slope to the car - there was still a tiny little bit of residual coolness on my skin.